Broadly speaking, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla are all “technology” companies. Looking more specifically, though, each company occupies fundamentally different categories of tech. Apple is a consumer computing hardware manufacturer. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. Other products that it makes, including the so-called “services,” are primarily accessories to or supportive of their consumer computing hardware: e.g., App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud. Apple’s specific product focus has remained unchanged since its founding as “Apple Computer Company.”

Meta has tried to pivot to the so-called “metaverse,” symbolically renaming the whole company from “Facebook” and continuing to pour $billions every year into the effort, yet with not much more return on investment than Apple’s own “spatial computing”, i.e., Vision Pro. And now Meta is trying to pivot to A.I., pouring a ton of money into that too, but with nothing much to show for it. We’re supposed to be impressed by Meta poaching individual Apple engineers with nine-figure pay packages, which in one sense is impressive, just not impressive in the sense of paying off for Meta. Perhaps it will pay off for Meta in the future. Or perhaps not. Meanwhile, Meta is still practically printing money at its old, core business: selling ads on social media

Jobs did not just make tech products willy-nilly, for no other reason than to maximize profit and stockholder returns. He was always focused specifically on consumer computing devices and platforms. That’s what he cared about, and where his experienced rested. When Jobs left Apple in the 1980s, what did he do? Again, he created a new personal computing platform, NeXT, a combination of hardware and operating system, just like the Apple II, Lisa, and Macintosh that came before. Jobs was innovating… on a theme, almost like a classical composer. Jobs was eventually able to return to Apple and become CEO precisely because Jobs made what Apple needed: a personal computer operating system, NeXTSTEP, which became Mac OS X.

It’s instructive to recall that the iPod, Apple’s second hit product under CEO Jobs after the iMac, was not only a consumer electronics device but also originally an accessory to the Mac.

I feel that McGee and other critics of Tim Cook fallaciously lump Apple in with other tech companies that are not Apple competitors. Tesla is not an Apple competitor. Neither are Nvidia or Meta, or for that matter, Amazon. You have to ask what makes Amazon a “tech” company. Amazon is primarily a retailer of physical goods. It sells those goods over the internet, which was novel in the 1990s but unremarkable today. I can order food online, but that doesn’t make the restaurant a tech company. If any product qualifies Amazon for the label, I’d say it would be Amazon Web Services. This is a business product, though, not a consumer product.

Why are we comparing Apple to Meta and Nvidia rather than to Samsung and Xiaomi on mobile, Lenovo and HP on desktop? Perhaps those markets have become saturated and don’t provide as much room for growth as other potential markets. So what? I get the impression that commentators complaining about Tim Cook’s lack of innovation simply want “growth,” unlimited growth, without any purpose behind that growth, technology without the intersection of the liberal arts, to use a metaphor from Steve Jobs, who always had a purpose, his innovation always oriented toward consumer computing hardware

The MacBook Pro with M1 (from $1,299) is a laptop with an unbeatable combo of power and endurance, making it a fantastic laptop even now it's been surpassed by the MacBook Pro with M2. And I know this because I’ve been using this system for months to plow through my workload, and I can barely get this machine to stutter no matter what I throw at it.Thanks to the M1 chip, the Apple Silicon inside this 3-pound beast runs circles around most Windows laptops when it comes to sheer performance. Just as important, the new MacBook Pro M1 outlasts the competition on battery life — by a lot. We’re talking more than 16 hours of endurance. My only complaint is that Apple hasn’t touched the design.

To me it's pretty clearly the same targeted advertising available anywhere with the extra claim of using "voice data". It doesn't say what the voice data is or where it comes from. They could say that when people do google searches using Siri/OkGoogle/the microphone option on Google - it's information they would use in an anonymized way to target ads, or rather Google does on your behalf, and it's technically a derivative of voice data.

I'm skeptical this is what people might think it is. To be clear, I think most readers would interpret this as "your phone is surreptiously listening to you via your microphone." If that were true, then there would be telltale signs of resource draw. Handling rich audio data has practical costs, whether battery, CPU, network, memory, and/or disk; that data has to be stored, transmitted, and processed somehow. I've never seen analysis that shows that's happening. Not to mention this capability is beyond what audio capture APIs in Android and iOS offer, as far as I know.

There are a multitude of viable culprits behind this revenue drop. Robson himself pointed to the pandemic and tightened global budgets while arguing that “the widespread adoption of design thinking . . . has reduced demand for our services.” (Ideo was, in part, its own competition here since for years, it sold courses on design thinking.) It’s perhaps worth noting that, while design thinking was a buzzword from the ’90s to the early 2010s, it’s commonly met with all sorts of criticism today.

“People were like, ‘We did the process, why doesn’t our business transform?'” says Cliff Kuang, a UX designer and coauthor of User Friendly (and a former Fast Company editor). He points to PepsiCo, which in 2012 hired its first chief design officer and opened an in-house design studio. The investment has not yielded a string of blockbusters (and certainly no iPhone for soda). One widely promoted product, Drinkfinity, attempted to respond to diminishing soft-drink sales with K-Cup-style pods and a reusable water bottle. The design process was meticulous, with extensive prototyping and testing. But Drinkfinity had a short shelf life, discontinued within two years of its 2018 release.

“Design is rarely the thing that determines whether something succeeds in the market,” Kuang says. Take Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. “Jeff Bezos henpecked the original Kindle design to death. Because he didn’t believe in capacitive touch, he put a keyboard on it, and all this other stuff,” Kuang says. “Then the designer of the original Kindle walked and gave [the model] to Barnes & Noble.” Barnes & Noble released a product with a superior physical design, the Nook. But design was no match for distribution. According to the most recent data, Amazon owns approximately 80% of the e-book market share.

The rise of mobile computing has forced companies to create effortless user experiences—or risk getting left behind. When you hail an Uber or order toilet paper in a single click, you are reaping the benefits of carefully considered design. A 2018 McKinsey study found that companies with the strongest commitment to design and the best execution of design principles had revenue that was 32 percentage points higher—and shareholder returns that were 56 percentage points higher—than other companies.

The company is considering the use of carbon nanotubes to improve the conductivity of battery materials, delivering better performance from lesser-used battery materials. Apple is also looking to increase its battery's silicon content, replacing graphite to increase capacity, and shorten charging and discharging times. The result is expected to be an innovative battery type that has not yet been commercialized. A source familiar with Apple's plans suggested to ETNews that the Vision Pro headset has dramatically increased the company's need for high-performance batteries. The headset features just two hours of battery life. Other devices such as the Apple Watch and iPad have been left with the same "all-day" battery life since their introduction. Apple's custom battery project was reportedly co-developed with the company's electric vehicle project, but the mobile applications are now the main target for the technology. It is expected to begin being added to Apple devices starting in 2025.

Apple’s M-series silicon team is simply on fire, doing some of the most impressive work in the history of computer architecture design and engineering. PC laptops in this class weigh over 6.5 pounds and offer terrible battery life; the 16-inch MacBook Pro weighs 4.7–4.8, the 14-inch MacBook Pro just 3.4–3.6, and all offer remarkably long battery life. It’s not like Apple’s silicon team had one breakthrough moment back in 2020 and have since been regressing to the mean — they continue to increase their lead over the rest of the industry in performance-per-watt.